Ocean Black

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Angie buzzed him on the intercom. “Mr. Unruh is here, sir.”

She only called him “sir,” when others were present, no matter who it was. Hampstead had tried to break her of the habit when it wasn’t necessary, but she would make promises, and then break them as soon as he had a visitor.

“I guess we can let him in, Angie. Search him for guns and stuff, will you?”

“Mr. Hampstead!”

Grinning, he got up and went around his desk as Unruh entered his office.

“What an unexpected pleasure,” he said.

Unruh smiled, though somewhat grimly. “I was getting bored, so I came over to look at your wrestling posters.”

“You want coffee or something?”

“Nah, I’m coffeed out.”

He actually walked around the perimeter of the office and perused the posters. Then he sat down in one of the two cushioned visitor chairs in front of Hampstead’s desk.

Hampstead sat on the corner of the desk. “You must have terrific news, to come all the way over to my place.”

“I told you. I came to see the posters.”

“And I believe that, of course.”

“I get antsy when there’s no action,” Unruh said. “I spent too many years in the operations directorate.”

“So nothing’s happening?”

Unruh had already told him about the makeup of the task force. “I’ve done my part. I looked into Deride and AquaGeo.”

“And found?”

“He’s a hard and smart man. Came out of nowhere to make Forbes’ top ten wealthiest. He worked the oil fields to put himself through the University of Sydney and then Oxford, and then he worked some more. When he decided to strike off on his own, his first big project in New Zealand came up roses — million dollar roses. That gave him the cash and leverage base he needed, and he’s been hitting about ninety per cent of every venture he tries.”

“And that’s it?”

“The Agency, nor the Bureau when I checked over there, have a great deal of interest in an Australian entrepreneur, Avery. The files are not extensive on the man as a person.”

“How about his company?”

“Just about as sparse. There have been some complaints over the years, and they’re mostly from people who felt they got the raw end of a deal. As far as I can tell, there’s been nothing fraudulent, but there have been some sore losers. I checked out my information with what a guy named Porter in your building is supposed to come up with.”

“Sam Porter?”

“That’s it. He any good?”

“A political hack,” Hampstead said. “But he knows the right people.”

“He says that that it appears as if AquaGeo often walks the fine lines of ethics, but they’ve never been in criminal court, and they’ve never had anything illegal proven against them. They are litigious.”

“Lots of lawsuits?”

“From what Porter tells me,” Unruh said, “yes.”

“They lose any?”

“Nope. They either win or settle out of court.”

“Who’s been suing them?”

“It’s the other way around, Avery. AquaGeo is the first to go to court, and then they draw it out for as long as possible, often for years. They sue the little guys over clauses in contracts, over the amount of royalties, over anything. They sue the big guys for the same things, as well as infringement of contractual rights. Their law-guy, name of Anthony Camden, likes to overload the system with paper, though he’s rarely in court.”

“What companies are involved?” Hampstead asked.

“The details I don’t have. Porter gave me the gist of it over the phone, and I assume he’ll have more for our meeting in the morning. The picture I get….”

Angie interrupted him. The intercom blared, “Mr. Hampstead!”

He leaned across the desk and depressed the talk button. “Yes, Angie?”

“Dr. Brande is on the line. He says it’s urgent.”

Still leaning across his desktop, Hampstead punched the phone button and picked up the receiver. “Hello, Dane. What’s up?”

Brande was normally even-tempered, especially in a crisis, but Hampstead heard the rare edge of rage in his voice.

“The son-of-a-bitches rammed DepthFinder.”

Penny Glenn tried to get the straight story out of Mac McBride, the wiry Irishman who was piloting B-3, the Melbourne. The scrambled acoustic telephone made conversation warped as it was, and McBride had probably damaged his antennas, judging from the way the transmission was interrupted or stopped altogether.

All six of the people in the station were gathered around her console, peering over her shoulder as if they would get to see some live action shots on the screen, but it was blank. She had tried to link into the Melbourne’s telemetry, but that was also garbled. The tension in the room was almost visible.

“I didn’t get that, Mac. Repeat.”

“I said… we went under… her… get the….”

The transmission broke off again.

Glenn spun around to Gary Munro. “Launch the Sydney and get over there.”

Munro turned and ran for the hatch, signaling his assistant to follow him.

“…AG-4… you there?”

“I’m here, Mac. Tell me again.”

Silence.

All Glenn knew from the first reports, as she had told Deride on the phone, was that the Melbourne had collided with the DepthFinder near Site F.

Jesus. All that ocean out there, and two submersibles meet each other at speed.

She felt isolated, lacking the information she needed to make decisions. McBride was able to transmit sporadically, but she wondered about the condition of Brande’s submersible. At these depths, it didn’t take much damage to achieve critical states.

“Bert,” she told Conroy, “get on the clear acoustic and see if you can pick up any transmissions from the Orion.”

“Right away, Penny.” He settled into a chair at the console next to hers.

“Ag-4….”

“I hear you, Mac.”

“Told you… we were only… going… cut the tow.”

Shit! Cut the tow!

She had to assume that the DepthFinder was towing some kind of robot. And McBride had taken it upon himself to sever the towline. That would be construed as an unprovoked attack. Both Deride and Camden were going to scream.

“Tell me more, Mac.”

“…came back… on us.”

Oh, damn!

Glenn needed information, and she needed it fast. She was going to have to control the data on this, to put the best face on it.

Gary Munro broke onto the circuit. “Sydney here, AG-4. We’re underway.”

“Give me an ETA, Gary.”

“We’ll churn water, Penny, but it’s still going to be over three hours.”

“Well, hurry up, damn it! There’s lives at stake.”

“Rate of ascent one hundred feet per minute, Kaylene,” Emry said. “That’s the max. We’re two-six-hundred off the bottom.”

It was dark. Thomas has shut down all of the lights and most of the electrical draw. Only a few of the crucial instruments were providing light inside the sphere. Her hands felt as if they were shaking, but they seemed steady enough on the joysticks.

“How’s Svetlana?”

“Not responding,” Emry said. “I think I’ve stopped the bleeding.”

Emry was on his knees in his seat, leaning over the back of the pilot’s seat to cradle Polodka’s head in the crook of his arm.

Brande’s voice, when it came over her headset, was confident and reassuring. “Rae, can you give me a status report now?”

Since her first report of the collision, he had been patient — and probably frantic — while she and Emry stabilized the submersible.

“Svetlana’s unconconscious. Larry’s stopped the blood flow.”

“How did that happen?” he asked.

“We were struck on the starboard side, and she was thrown to the right. We think she hit her head on the gyro control panel. There’s a long gash on her temple.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Larry, too. Svetlana seems to be breathing normally, and her pulse rate is down, but stabilized.”

“Okay,” Brande said. “Now, we’re showing you at maximum ascent.”

“Correct. I dropped the weights immediately.”

“We also show that you’ve lost a little over seventy per cent of your available electrical capacity.”

Thomas took a deep breath, trying to calculate.

Brande did it for her. “That still gives you plenty of time, if you conserve.”

“I’ve got practically everything shut down, Dane. I’m not getting readings on amperage draw or the voltage meters.”

“It looks all right from here. Don’t worry about it.”

“The bastard must have damaged the battery tray.”

“I suspect that’s the case,” Brande said.

She didn’t know how he could be so calm. All of her will power was devoted to keeping her voice level; she didn’t want to alarm Emry.

“How about environment?” Brande asked. “We’re not getting the telemetry.”

She was aware that he had worked slowly up to that question. She knew he would be worried. Thomas and Dokey were the only two at MVU who knew the full story of Janelle Brande’s death. She thought she knew the agony he had gone through when he had finally given her the last of the available air tanks and had watched her die.

“Larry says the scrubber is still working full-time. The flow from the external oxygen tank has decreased, but the emergency bottle is fine, and we’re augmenting from it.”

“Has Larry made a calculation?”

Emry broke in. “I’m on the line, too, Dane. It’s not like I stepped outside for a smoke. Yeah, on rough estimate, we’ve got a bit more than seven hours.”

“Good. That’s good. Any structural damage to the pressure hull?”

“None that we can detect from the inside,” Thomas said.

“I wonder if you could deploy Atlas and check the external damage?”

Thomas released the right joystick and flicked the switch to activate the robot. Immediately, an amber caution light flared.

She flipped the switch back.

“Not this trip, Dane. I’m getting a fault in one of the control circuits.”

Dokey was nearby, too. He said, “Kaylene, check the ROV circuit breakers.”

She had to turn on an interior light for a minute in order to see the circuit breakers, located low on her left.

“All of them have blown, Okey.”

He thought that over for all of ten seconds. “Let’s let it be, Dane. We don’t want to use up energy looking for the problems, anyway.”

“It’s your call, Rae,” Brande said.

“We’ll follow Okey’s recommendation,” she said.

“Next,” Brande said. “We lost signals from Sarscan. What are you showing?”

“Nothing,” Thomas said, involuntarily glancing at the monitor in front of Polodka, which had been carrying the sonar return from the search robot. It was now blank.

“She’s still in tow,” she clarified. “because I can feel the drag, but we don’t have control over her.”

“How much of a drag?” Brande asked. “We’d probably better jettison her.”

“It’s not all that bad, Dane. We’re getting full ascent rate, and I suspect her diving planes were in the up position when she lost power. Let’s hold on for now.”

“We can always recover her later,” Brande said.

“We’ll wait.”

“Okay. Svetlana?”

Thomas glanced to her right. Emry had slipped out of both of his sweaters and was using them to cushion Polodka’s head against the side of the hull. She released the joysticks and began to unbutton her own sweater.

“She’s the same, Dane.”

“Is there anything else we can check for you, Kaylene?” Dokey asked.

“I don’t think so. We’re stable, and now we just wait.”

“One other thing,” Brande said. “What about the other sub. Are you showing it on sonar?”

“I shut down the sonar, Dane.”

“Try it one time,” Dokey urged.

After handing her sweater to Emry, Thomas turned on the sonar, channeling the image to the screen in front of her. It took a few minutes to warm up.

When it came on-line, she noted the elongated blob in the lower right quadrant.

The audio volume was up, and her earphones sounded off with the “Ping, ping,” of contact.

“Damn!”

“What!” Brande’s voice now carried the higher register of his concern.

“They’re right alongside us.”